why don't you love me - NOW!

 A long-running mystery tune abruptly identified!

An early work by Neil Trix (who a few years later I'd interview by phone for the Ambient Jungle / Nuum Series #2 Wire piece, largely on account of his majestic audio-canvas "Gesture Without Motion" which appeared on Enforcers 6 & 7)

This first salvo = ruff n tuff Brit-B-boy breakage, in that "Drum Trip II" sort of zone

But where's that insistent (indignant?) diva vocal from?

flipside

Another killer Trix tune that is a bit of 'mystery track' for me if not a frontline urgent-to-identify

More FBD Project darkcore - bit of a classic, with the downswooping slime-sounds and doomy bass-steps

Regarded highly enough to get the Johnny Jungle remix

the Trix mix

"Warning: This is a Serious E.P." 

The Future! That's where we're heading, that's where we're already living!

"some of us live for the future" the voice wheedles slimily

According to Discogs, the FBD in FBD Project originally stood for Funded By Drugs  

Then later on it stood for Future Beyond Dance

In that little shift, the story of rave is distilled 

From ardkore to artcore

From the frenz-E of NOW! to an increasingly kitschy palette of futuristic imagery, titles, names and sonix

Bang-In-Tunes though, as the label name Trix & cru stuck with right through to 1998, continues to fly the rave flag  

From Discogs:

"Bang-in Tunes was originally a Coventry record shop with close links to The Eclipse and Amnesia House. The shop's Baby&Gun art work was done by Coventry graffiti artist Toz.

The label was owned by Luke Coogan & Neil Trix (aka FBD Project), with much of the studio work done in the basement studio of the shop on Hale St. Coventry.

Launched as a hardcore label the first release came out in 1992 and was followed by some classic dark side in 1993 before moving towards the more intelligent drum & base style from 1994 onwards."

stop press: Michaelangelo Matos directs me to the actual Bang-In-Tunes mixtapes lovingly audio archived on the internet!

the first one

https://www.mixcloud.com/adabcfc/luke-neil-trix-bang-in-tunes-vol1-studio-tape-coventry-late-1992/

with the tunes ID-ed here

https://www.tuneid.com/showthread.php?60071-Neil-Trix-amp-Luke-Bang-In-Tunes-Vol-1-Studio-Tape-1992

the second one on YouTube

 

I must do a proper trawl through the Bang-In-Tunes discography at some point

I shall leave you with "Gesture Without Motion", the T.S. Eliot "The Hollow Men"-via-Marlon Brando  / Colonel Kurtz via Apocalypse Now sampling epic done for Enforcers 6 & 7

I remember listening to this over and over on headphones on the beach at Shelter Island that summer. 

A VIP unreleased version that came out a few years ago

shample shpotting shaddo

 

doth take a snippet from this 

Mixrace + Pro-Ton-Isospace via Cardrossmaniac2's post on the trackige of the Hyper-On/JMJ&Richie/EZ-Rollers diaspora  - but wisely steering clear of the Flytronix morass

although that said I did find a few Fly specks of niceness on my own not-so-long-ago trawl through said diaspora

Hyper-On the rmx tip w/ Pro-Ton

didn't realise that Parallel World was part of  said diaspora though 

"Tear Into It" is a tuff tune

niceness

dolphin jungle before that became a byword for boring

oddly another Moving Shadow associated artist, DJ Trax also went by the name Parallel Worlds

"LISTEN & LEARN"

The not unwarranted superiority complex of the Reinforced cru!

What was it Rob Playford said? That Reinforced were the scene's research lab 

Operating just that little ahead of everybody else.... 

The vanguard

Ever so slightly forbidding and coldblooded as a result

At times, anyway - for sure they had their manic nutty moments and sent-E-mental anthems, later on  lush 'n 'sexy souljazzual

Recently been listening to this beaut a lot...

(Listening to the original Scarface version as I did for the first time recently was weird - just sounded wrong because the 4 Hero reframing is so sensitively done, it feels like he rapped over it in the studio, as opposed to having the rhythm scaffolding built around his lines - so snugly does his flow fit the groove) 

Here's a different 4 Hero remix of "Seen A Man" -  starker and ruffer - not quite as wondrous as the above.

But there's also an overly mellow Talkin Loud-vibed version of the tune by 4 Hero, a warning sign - perhaps where the "LISTEN & LEARN" attitude can ultimately lead ("proper music")

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

[Some earlier thoughts on Reinforced's eminence]

Surely the greatest label of the first half of the Nineties.

Not just in jungle, but on all fronts.

The militant commitment to a vision-quest.... the sheer sustained strike rate combined with the relentless forward drive....

But what about Reinforced during the second half of the '90s?

I carried on loyally buying a lot of their stuff - not loyally, really, just genuinely excited by things heard in the store (by that point usually Breakbeat Science the NYC hub for the city's junglists)

However very little of it has stuck with me - in the sense that I literally can't remember it.

Part of it is that tracks by Arcon 2 or Sonar Circle or whoever, the tracks get so convoluted and dense with editing and processing, they actually defy memory.

Also they weren't things you'd hear played out, like, ever - so no memories got attached to them.

So the last thing from that camp that really stuck with me is actually not technically on Reinforced - it's the Jacob's Optical Stairway album, which came out on Crammed or something like that.

Reinforced proper, would probably be the Cold Mission stuff.

 

"All tracks recorded in 3D-Sound"

 

Got an email a few years ago from Tone Def supremo DJ Yomi, pointing out that 4 Horsemen did not simply = Foul Play alter ego, but was a collaboration with him. He was going to give me the whole 4 Horsemen / Tone Def story but never happened....  Would be interested to know how they vibed that vibe. 

i'm not too surprised at the persistence and wide dispersal of the term "post-rock", it's sufficiently vague and elastic and evocative to lend itself to many purposes

i am a bit surprised at the half-lives of the term neurofunk, another of my creations (i did coin that one, as far as i can tell; post-rock as a term goes back as far as 1967, but it was me that affixed it to its 1993-onwards meaning, although that has since drifted some way from what I envisaged)

yeah but neurofunk -- that was always, well, if not quite a joke, then certainly there was an undercurrent of malice

i disliked that direction in drum and bass, it left me cold .. up to a point i could appreciate some of the production and the atmosphere-sculpting but it just didn't give me the rush i got from "Renegade Snares", "Terrorist", "Helicopter Tune", "Supersharp Shooter", "Shadowboxing", "Squadron", etc etc

it had turned into something else, something that required a name

so I tried to come up with as unappetising a name as possible

ArtCore and Ambient Jungle has become compilation titles, so I really hoped that some label would heist the term and (as with Artcore and Ambient Jungle) hasten the acceleration of the sound away from that direction, make it as short-lived as possible

or even kill it off

of course that didn't happen and as this shows, the style abides as basically the dominant strain in drum'n'bass

what i get from this video mix of landmark tracks in the genre's evolution from 1997 to round about now is not really "the evolution of neurofunk", but a sense of stasis -- not only does the style not appear to have made any giant leap forward, it often sounds like more or less the same bassline (certainly on a timbral level, but even the way the B-lines are patterned), and the same basic beat, in all these songs

the main evolutionary leap seems to have been from what I was talking about in that December 97 Wire piece (more clinical Optical/Jonny L) to the Bad Company sound at the end of the 90s. and then it doesn't seem to make any leaps as such

(BC who i briefly rated as the Motorhead of D&B but in retrospect seem more like the Judas Priest)